The Biggest Prime

February 8, 2013

However, when I ran that program, the machine thrashed for a while, and after about a minute, crashed. So I wrote this program using C/GMP, which can be compiled with the command gcc bigprime.c -lgmp -o bigprime:

The first attempt using Python 2.7 failed. It is no problem to make the prime, but printing it (or converting it to a string) takes more than 2 hours (and maybe never finishes). Using the gmpy library the time taken is 22 secs. It creates a file of about 17 MB.